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Incanter’s Absorption

This has been knocking around my brain for a while, so I’ll spell it out here.

Mostly, I’m looking at the possible power of Incanter’s Absorption in a raiding environment, and how it interacts with that Frost Warding talent that’s sucked for so long… and, of course, how all that works together with constantly tossing up Frost Ward/Fire Ward.

We all know how these work. Whenever you absorb damage, Incanter’s Absorption boosts your spellpower by a percentage of whatever you absorb.

Frost Warding, then, gives you a chance to negate a given frost/fire spell (which does NOT count towards it’s absorption total), restoring the damage as mana. This is a 30% proc rate, so not something you can depend on every time, but can depend on enough to be proccing frequently.

So I had questions. So many questions.

Obviously, the synergy between these two talents won’t be available every fight. It’ll only work on fights where you can expect to take frost or fire damage.

(Unless you have a Discipline priest, I guess. Get on the good side of one of them, and those guys can basically feed you hundreds of spellpower in a high AoE environment.)

The first thing I needed to know was if the damage negation from the talent affected the total absorption.

Then again to 450 extra spellpower a couple seconds later. Let’s say Frost Ward dies at this point.

Now you have 450 spellpower more than you normally do. If you have, say, a damage trinket and AP available, pop those two together and the extra damage you deal is greatly magnified.

It doesn’t actually work that way, but if you’re allergic to math you can consider it to work that way.

~=~

This is how it actually works:

IA buffs can be rolled. Absorbing more damage does refresh the stack… well sort of.

Rather than the ability simply keeping track of multiple spellpower values, and dropping them off at the appropriate times, it simply adds everything together for a single buff that you can keep rolling for as long as you can.

2 seconds pass, and you absorb another 1000 damage, giving you another boost of 150. That’s the first part of the equation.

Your old spellpower value was 150. This number is multiplied by whatever time is left on your current IA buff, divided by ten. In this case, you have 8 seconds left, so the 150 spellpower is multiplied by 0.8.

This gives you a value of 120, which is then added to the new 150 spellpower, for a total of 270 spellpower for the next ten seconds.

Let’s say this keeps going. The next tick, two seconds later, misses you for whatever reason, and you don’t absorb anything until two seconds after that. This number is also 1000.

Therefore:

(1000)*0.15 + (270)*(6/10) = New SP value

150 + 162 = 312 spellpower.

Technically speaking, any given spellpower boost is only present for the 10 seconds as advertised, it’s just normalized into a single, formulaic buff that doesn’t eat up Blizzard’s hardware trying to keep track of multiple buffs at once.

(In other words, the original buff lasts for 10 seconds, 2 seconds have passed, therefore 80% of it’s power is passed onto the next buff.)

Note that, as with anything else, these calculations are subject to rounding.

~=~

Anyway. Where was I?

So Incanter’s Absorption feeds you extra spellpower. Basically any fight where you can count on getting hit with either frost or fire damage.

And even if you can’t count on it, there are some fights (like, say, Razorscale or Hodir) where you can intentionally “stand in fire” for a tick or two, and let the extra mana and spellpower roll on in.

The real question is, is all this worth it? Is it worth spending the mana and a GCD for some extra spellpower and some mana?

Frost Ward was cast six times that fight. In addition to the spellpower boosts from IA, those 6 Frost Wards gave the mage back a whopping 12960 mana.

Nearly 13k mana, restoring a mere 631 mana less than Evocation did, and a paltry 1471 less mana than Replenishment did.

Yes, you read that right. The mana returned from Frost Warding was rivaling Replenishment and Evocation, the two hugest (non-Innervate) sources of mana a mage can get.

But still, is it worth it? It’s only going to be available on fights with frost and fire damage splashing around, and of course you have to remember to cast the damn Ward.

In my eyes, you aren’t really sacrificing anything to get the talents. Frost is little more than an annoying necessity to get Icy Veins, so it isn’t hard to come up with two talent points to put in there.

Getting IA itself may be a little more difficult. The range talents, even the pushback talents or any of those other flavor things can be dropped in exchange for IA. Hell, you can even drop points from Arcane Focus, if you want. There’s lots of hit gear swimming around, and really… what else are you going to gear for? The rather bad haste or the terrible crit?

You have nothing to lose, but something to gain. I think it’s worth it.

Just… if you do, try not to become that annoying mage that always asks for stuff, mk? I mean, arcanists already beg for Mana Tide/Innervate, do you really want to start nagging discipline priests for constant bubbles too?

(Yes, of course you do.)

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14 Responses

well disc priests are rare – if you have one in your raids he is busy buffing and healing the MTs. i think it’s a bit much to ask him to constantly boost your dps, personally i’d feel daft doing this when people got bigger problems..

unbuffed my mage has 2320 spellpower
buffed in a 10 man and flasked i am up to 2550ish spellpower

at 20k hp the max SP gained from absorbtion is 1000 (5% of hp)

if a disc priests sheild absorbs 7000 dmg then 15% of that is 1050 which is more than the cap

so i was be above 3600 spellpower as long as the buff was active

and if you have an ele shaman keeping his totem up i can get close to 4k spellpower throughout the fight

not to mention i was popping IV/AP as often as i could while IA was up

my arcane blasts were hittting for 26k 3 stacked
preeetty nice

although depending on some fights u wont benefit at all from the talents
unless of course you’re bribing a disc priest to sheild you (which is harder than it sounds to make them REMEMBER to actually do it lol)

oh and also dont forget to glyph for frost and fire warding theyre both minor glyphs which is nice

I have IA in my PvP build. Besides the fact that there are a lot of disc priests running around these days, my best friend and arena partner also happens to be one, so I can count on a regular supply of bubbles. I wasn’t aware of how it worked with Frost Ward though…I’ll have to remember that the next time I see that other mage over there bring out a water elemental. Now, where can I put Frost Ward on my hotkeys …. I gotta do some work on those and add some more spacesaving macros.

I actually use Frost Warding in my talent build, since I’m currently in the middle of Kel/Sapph for this week’s naxx runs. It lets me run Molten Armor instead of Mage Armor, since my mana issues are somewhat assuaged by the mana return granted by Frost Ward.

But then again, the concept of mana in Frost PvE is quite laughable. But in the case of relatively long fights such as Kel and Sapph, it definitely gives you something to think about.

I kinda like this from the priest angel – man when I was a baby (noob) priest all I wanted to do in instances was bubble my tank. Sadly I was horde and in those days we didn’t have the paladin power… which meant I was constantly being smacked down by rage-starved warriors and druids before one of them sat me down and helped me grow a clue.

It beat Evocation on Saph! I evocated twice during that fight and Frost warding ticked 16 times. I’d go OOM, put the Frost ward up, walk into a blizzard and step back out with 10k mana :D

HIGHLY situational spec, but so far, it plays just like regular arcane on any boss fight, and on the high damage ones it just soars in SP. Slightly gimmicky but with dual spec you go FB or FFB as your other spec.

thanks for the info on this subject….A mage in a friends guild was using this in raids and ended up with awesome dps…..16k average on totGc 25 heroic twins and peaking at 24k with all cd’s. I’m impressed :D